‘I’ve never spent so much time on minutes in the past 12 years in this city.’

Whoever is interested in the possibilities of parliamentary procedure as a form of improvisational theater should not miss a session of the Burbank-Glendale-Pasadena Airport Authority.

On the first and third Monday of each month, a few of the authority’s nine appointees religiously engage in dogged battles of motions, amendments and points of order.

Usually this is not published in detail. Reporters tend to defer to the authority’s actual decisions, which involve millions of dollars and affect thousands of people.

This week, though, there wasn’t much else to report, as the meeting was devoted almost entirely to the parliamentary contest. At issue was how the minutes should be kept.

According to my notes and those of the airport’s director of community relations, Victor Gill, what happened went something like this:

Commissioner Margie A. Gee, a Burbank homeowner and anti-noise advocate, moved to amend the minutes of the June 16 meeting by adding a comment of hers.

Commissioner Leland C. Ayers, a Burbank businessman, seconded her motion but, after some discussion, withdrew the second. President Robert W. Garcin declared the motion dead.

“Point of order,” Gee said. She had evidently read the authority’s rule book, “Sturgis Standard Code of Parliamentary Procedure,” and said it did not require a second.

Garcin, a Glendale lawyer with styled gray hair, struck an expression of tolerant ennui and asked Gee to show him the rule.

Both thumbed through their Sturgises for a few minutes until Garcin himself tracked down a passage that he conceded proved Gee right.

He called for a vote on her motion. It failed, 7 to 1.

Someone moved to approve the July 7 minutes. Garcin was declaring them approved when Gee said there had been no second. Garcin reminded her that the rules did not require a second. Gee said she wanted to amend the minutes but would wait until after the next item, which turned out to be a discussion of the method of keeping minutes.

This came up because Gee had written a letter complaining that her point of view is consistently distorted and suppressed in the minutes.

Commissioner J. C. Schwarzenbach of Pasadena said he thought Gee wanted to “make the minutes a record of her opinions and desires.”

Commissioner Mary Lou Howard, a Burbank councilwoman and sometimes Gee’s ally in such disputes, said she thought minutes should record actions only and not lengthy quotations.

Gee said the others misunderstood her position.

“I do not like voluminous minutes,” she said. “I like accurate minutes.”

She moved that minutes should “accurately reflect actions and proceedings that transpire at meetings.”

Commissioner Jo Heckman of Pasadena asked what Gee meant by “proceedings.”

Gee said that would include all commissioners’ requests to staff members.

Garcin said that any request important enough to go in the minutes should be offered as a motion.

At that, Ayers, a former Burbank councilman, seemed to lose his composure.

“I’ve never spent so much time on minutes in the past 12 years in this city,” he said. “I have a dozen things to do this morning. I don’t want to sit around and talk about what somebody said.”

Ayers asked Gee to withdraw her motion. Garcin, however, advised him that only the president could make that request. So Ayers asked Garcin to ask Gee to withdraw her motion. He did, and she did.

Commissioner Carl Meseck of Glendale asked the staff to examine the idea of switching from Sturgis to the more widely known “Roberts Rules of Order.”

Garcin suggested that Meseck make it a motion so it would be recorded. He did, and it passed.

Gee moved to have the staff also describe the pros and cons of the two rule books. Garcin declared the motion out of order, saying that only the ruling body could decide pros and cons.

Gee amended the motion to ask the staff to compare the two books. It passed.

Then Gee returned to the July 7 minutes. She moved to have them note that she had asked the staff to put a motion of hers on the day’s agenda. Her motion to amend the minutes failed. Then Gee introduced her other motion, even though it wasn’t on the agenda.

It asked that the authority deny all new requests for airlines to use the airport until a new terminal is built.

Other commissioners reminded Gee that, under the authority’s interpretation of the law, it cannot restrict any airline that meets the existing airport rules.

Ayers moved to send a copy of the rules for review to the councils of the three cities that own the airport.

Commissioner Carroll W. Parcher, a former Glendale mayor, said he thought it would be premature to review the rules because the federal government is reviewing the rules covering aircraft noise.

Parcher asked Garcin to ask Ayers to withdraw his motion.

“We’ve become so formal,” Ayers sighed. “Can’t we talk to each other like human beings?” But he withdrew his motion. Soon the meeting adjourned.

And if this was less than a perfect record--drawn as it was from human memory and handwritten notes--the proper time to straighten it out will be 9 a.m. Monday, Aug. 4, in the authority meeting room. Don’t miss it.